An Eagle picking up a baby in Mont Royal Park in Montreal video that has gone viral has a lot of people wondering, is it real or fake.

After the video was posted on YouTube Tuesday, December 18, it quickly received over 1 million views in just a few hours.

For several hours, millions of people thought this video was real. It was being covered on numerous different media outlets across Canada, the US and even in Europe.

The YouTube video titled: “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” [WATCH BELOW] now has over 5.1 million views and in 59 seconds you see a baby snatched up by the eagle in a park and then dropped back to the ground a few feet away, as an adult runs to help. You can’t help but gasp, thinking if the baby is alright because it looks so real.

The truth has come out about the video, it’s fake. Four students in the 3D animation and digital design program at the National Animation and Design Centre, or Centre NAD, in Montreal, created the video.

“When we saw the reach that the video had received and all the questions that it had triggered, it seemed obvious to us that we had to take ownership of it, if only to show how realistic 3-D animation can be,” Claude Arsenault, a public relations manager for the university told ABC News.

She added that this 59 second viral video clip took the four students nearly 400 hours to create. The eagle and the baby were created using 3D animation and then added into the film.

“The goal in that class is to push 3-D animation to its limits and to show how believable 3-D animation can be as well,” Arsenault said. “I think that they achieved that. The video and all of the comments and all of the questions it triggered speaks for itself.”

Critics picked up the hoax immediately. David Bird, a professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, said the video was a fake. He explained, “I can assure you the film is a hoax and I’m almost 99 per cent sure that bird is an osprey, which is a bird that is somewhere between the size of a red-tailed hawk and a bald eagle. They eat fish, they don’t eat little kids. I don’t know of any cases really where a bird of prey has tried to pick up and fly off with a baby.”

Either way, the viral eagle snatching baby video got people talking. “It’s a great story and I think people are almost disappointed when I tell them it’s a hoax. It’s actually got bird-of-prey specialists from all over the world — from England to Tasmania — talking about it,” David Bird admitted.